Title

Authors

Document Type

Presentation

Journal/Book Title/Conference

2015 Midwest Relativity Meeting, CIERA Northwestern University

Publication Date

10-2-2015

Abstract

Gravity theories based on the conformal group give general relativity augmented by local dilatational covariance. In one of these theories, biconformal gravity, the dimension of the original space doubles, giving a symplectic manifold with conformal general relativity on a lagrangian submanifold.

The restriction of the Killing form to the biconformal space is non-degenerate and signature-changing. This opens several possibilities, from time arising only within solutions to a Euclidean gravity theory, to novel approaches to the AdS/CFT correspondence, or the natural emergence of an SO(n) Yang-Mills field on gravitating spacetime. We briefly discuss some of our investigations into these options.

Comments

First of a three talk sequence detailing applications of biconformal gravity to our understanding of time. The second talk, by former PhD student Jeffrey Hazboun, explored the application of biconformal techniques to the AdS/CFT conjecture. The third talk, by current student Ben Lovelady, described a dynamical approach to satisfying the Coleman-Mandula theorem.